I am Team Snow. Always have been. Always will be. If it is winter and grey outside, I want the white stuff. I’m fine with shoveling. I am not fine with having to put on rain boots to go into my basement.
Remember back to that first full COVID school year—my daughter was too young for it—but some of the talk around hybrid learning was about the end of snow days. The end of the magic of waking up to a free day. Of sleds and snowballs. Snowmen and snow angels. Playing outside until hands were raw, coming in to drop all the wet gear as close to a heat source as possible, drinking hot chocolate, and eating treats (I highly recommend homemade doughnuts with bowls of sugar - confectionery, cinnamon, vanilla). Repeating it all.
Except all that talk about the end of snow days failed to mention that it wasn't technology that would spell their death; it was our continued use of fossil fuels. A new study published this January shows that the human-caused climate crisis has reduced snowpack in most parts of the Northern Hemisphere in the last 40 years. According to the study published in the journal Nature, one of the areas experiencing the steepest global warming-related decline in snow is the U.S. Northeast, where we live.
It's been two years since we've had more than the briefest taste of snow-covered grass. What we've had instead is a lot of rain. So far this year, we've had one loss of power school day. We've also had an attempt for a normal day that resulted in the district sending an email shortly before school was supposed to start, reporting if you lived in one of several low-lying areas in town, buses couldn’t get to you. Loss of power day, high tide day, rain day. They don't really ring the same way as snow day.
Snow days were a regular part of my childhood. One of my childhood landscape reference points. But I doubt they will be for my daughter. Instead, they will be a rare childhood event. Right now, she wants to know why, if it is winter, there isn't snow. She remembers the year she was two when it snowed quite a bit. A friend gave us a blue sled and a green sled her children had outgrown, and we spent hours that winter using them on the small hill in our yard.
I've been using my child’s questions about the missing snow as a chance to discuss climate. To explain that there isn't snow because the Earth isn't feeling well this winter, and just like when she doesn't feel well and wants to sleep and watch TV, the Earth is feeling too hot to make snow. But just as we do things to help her feel better when she's sick, there are many things we can do to help the Earth feel better, like eating less meat and dairy, flying less, and turning off the lights when we leave a room. The list of things we can do continues and I explain that while it won't happen right away, eventually, the Earth could feel better. This is simplistic and optimistic, my child is 5, but what if we get it right? What if we really get it together in the next 5 to 10 years? For many of us, our adulthoods are about losing so many of our childhood reference landscapes, but could our children's adulthoods be filled with what they gain?
We went searching for snow. We drove to Vermont's Northeast Kingdom (which I also highly recommend), where there was 3-feet of it. The moment our feet hit the powdery, wet ground my child yelled snow, the dog rolled in it, I smiled. Snowballs and snow angels. Repeat.
~ Bridget